Boosted dark particles and the LZ nuclear recoil event
- 1National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics , Rävala 10 , Tallinn 10143 , Estonia
- 2Dipartimento di Fisica dell' Università di Pisa , Italia
Abstract
The LZ experiment reported one anomalous event with nuclear recoil energy of 248 keV. Galactic halo dark matter (DM) cannot produce such a large energy unless heavier than 74 GeV, and heavy DM with spin-independent interactions would have produced unseen recoils at lower energy. Inelastic DM has been proposed as a way out. We consider, instead, an elastic collision of a dark sector particle with a momentum of at least 123~MeV and mass in the range 1-74 GeV as deuteron break-up in SNO disfavors sub-GeV masses. The absence of accompanying lower-energy recoils favours interactions whose rate grows with the momentum transfer, such as a pseudoscalar-pseudoscalar nucleon operator. This implies no leading-order signal in argon, an annual modulation below 1 %, and recoils in spinful light nuclei where inelastic halo DM gives nothing.
Related
- LZ Nuclear-Recoil Excess from Boosted Light Magnetic Dipole-dipole Dark Matter
- Higgsino Dark Matter Interpretation of the LUX-ZEPLIN 248 keV Nuclear-Recoil Event
- Sub-TeV Singlino Dark Matter in light from Sagittarius A∗ and LUX-ZEPLIN Nuclear-Recoil Event
- High-Energy Nuclear Recoils from Boosted Dark Matter for the LZ 248-keV Event: Beyond the Halo-Dependent High-Velocity Tail
- LZ nuclear recoil event from inelastic singlet-doublet scalar dark matter
BibTeX
@misc{kannike2026boosted,
title = {{Boosted dark particles and the LZ nuclear recoil event}},
author = {Kristjan Kannike and Martti Raidal and Алессандро Струмиа},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.07742},
eprint = {2609.07742},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07742},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Boosted dark particles and the LZ nuclear recoil event
AU - Kristjan Kannike
AU - Martti Raidal
AU - Алессандро Струмиа
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.07742
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.07742
AB - The LZ experiment reported one anomalous event with nuclear recoil energy of 248 keV. Galactic halo dark matter (DM) cannot produce such a large energy unless heavier than 74 GeV, and heavy DM with spin-independent interactions would have produced unseen recoils at lower energy. Inelastic DM has been proposed as a way out. We consider, instead, an elastic collision of a dark sector particle with a momentum of at least 123~MeV and mass in the range 1-74 GeV as deuteron break-up in SNO disfavors sub-GeV masses. The absence of accompanying lower-energy recoils favours interactions whose rate grows with the momentum transfer, such as a pseudoscalar-pseudoscalar nucleon operator. This implies no leading-order signal in argon, an annual modulation below 1 %, and recoils in spinful light nuclei where inelastic halo DM gives nothing.
SN - 2331-8422
ER -